


Everybody Wants to Rule the World (Among Other Things)

by jamestiqueeriuskirk



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, The Flash (Comics), The Flash - All Media Types
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M, First Time, Gen, M/M, Trans Female Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-18
Updated: 2016-10-18
Packaged: 2018-08-23 07:37:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8319415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jamestiqueeriuskirk/pseuds/jamestiqueeriuskirk
Summary: Lots of fun, it was. Unparalleled. Truly unsurpassed, until it was, and it was broken after that.





	

**Author's Note:**

> i got high, shuffled the music i liked at 11, and wrote sum songfics

The City is at War - Cobra Starship

 

Well below the stifling uppercrust penthouses playing host to their eternal and willfully ignorant parties, it was bedlam, the streets. Bruce pressed forward deeper into the heart of downtown Gotham, navigating the batmobile through a maze of crumbling buildings buffering about rioters and opportunists, jostling one another before an altar of order, a line of police fighting their insistent tide.

A girl, tiny in a little, hooded, red jacket, tossed a bottle at his car as he sped by, finding her mark where Molotov cocktails and bullets, real and rubber, well- and ill-intentioned, had missed. He had to compliment her aim.

-

Freelove - Depeche Mode

 

The lighting was washed out, always, in Arkham, but the moon through the high bars cast into their cell (shared- budget cuts as always) a cover of night that felt like something of a halfway between rural Georgia and upstate new York. There was a slick and husky silence in the air.

Neither man dared speak, dared cry out. Crane’s teeth were clenched as tight as his fists in the sheets beneath them, but the rest of his posture was remarkably loose, soft target to Nigma’s attentions, placed right now on his shoulder. Now but not long.

Eyelashes first made contact, fluttering against one another so delicately, preceding lips and hands and someday much, much more though not tonight.

-

Forever Young - Alphaville

 

His empire was immense, and it was beginning to show signs of outliving him.

Not a poor fate, all things considered. A Caesar, leaving his conquered behind as he slept his way into state divinity. A legacy, something unique to him, a bridge between the old and the new and the very new.

Those first years, much he passed on the inside, when he’d hit banks and those later, when his business swelled, a lounge in the heart of Gotham City, catering to the just and the unjust alike, changing with the organization creeping into Gotham once more, not yet beaten back, not in his lifetime and perhaps not ever, though the horizon he would last see might suggest.

-

Hot Mess - Cobra Starship

 

Dent knew nor cared very little for Nigma’s past, not in any capacity of personality. Whatever left him this way had done a number on him, that much was certain without need for elaboration.

Nigma was wanton, was vile, lounged onto his desk until he couldn’t help himself, thrust him to his breaking point only for the sake of pushing his buttons, desperately drank of him when he finally found himself there. 

-

Teenage Dream - Katy Perry

 

Hartley had been to beaches. So many of them; stayed in five star resorts while there. But he’d never seen a beach quite like the one in the tiny motel’s grimy painting, the only wall trapping that greeted him whenever he chanced to look away from James.

Hartley’s throat pounded with his heartbeat, and though James felt quite the same, his beat quite steadily against Hartley’s back, James’s chin against his neck where surely he could feel Hartley’s nerves working overtime.

Neither had ever done anything like this before.

-

Crazy - Gnarls Barkley

 

It really was a thrill, when you tried it. They never seemed to see it, not even Harley, bless her spunky, little heart.

He’d seen. It had gone marvelously for him, a chain reaction of the perfect circumstances for an epiphany of novel proportions.

The rain was bright, the sky was bright, and the world was brighter all over when he stumbled for the last time of all to the tiny apartment. It was empty now.  
His head was buzzing, fuzzy and yet in some ways so, so clear.

-

Kiss From a Rose - Seal

 

Selina was in wait. That seemed to be her lot, lately. A duty conscribed to her occupancy of the sacred liminal, the rooftops and fire escapes and the maintenance scaffolding.

He would be here. It was prescribed for both of them.

It was on a statuary ledge of a skycraping, steepled gothic where he found her that night. 

She was only a little surprised, as a token.

The masks remained, his final hold out.

There was moon above but it could not rival the glow of street down below, casting them into each other’s eyes fixedly. A reflecting pool infinite. A stretched out future infinite. A whole world. A precipice, both physical and metaphysical, over the city.

They did not leave together, but they did not feel more than passing sadness.

-

Photobooth - Death Cab for Cutie

 

Everyone’d had enough of him, even himself. Just like father, like son of course. Dent was surprised Nigma hadn’t had enough of him, too.

Their motel was dingy. The curtains were orange, patterned suburban and ticky tacky. It was called the Rocket Man or something. Something. Something not period appropriate, not in line with the square cubby room divider and neon boomerang of its sign.

Those curtains were always drawn, always masking their front window/wall, but never muffling the voices, infamous and yet strange, rising over one another into the hot and still summer of stale fifties peace and smothering marital ill, putting one another out over and over, but always dying to a hush by morning’s cold clinical relief.

-  
She’s Always a Woman - Billy Joel

 

The first time she ran, Bruce chased her. 

The second time, again, though to different result.

The third time, she got away.

The fourth, she was cradling a martini, tiny in her clamped hand.

Her laughter was musical, befitting the pretended frivolity between a playboy pretender and his newest mark, but her voice was strained.

“I don’t belong here,” 

She meant many things.

“No,” Bruce agreed, but she saw and she followed him out of the room.

-

Everybody Wants to Rule the World - Tears for Fears

 

Lots of fun, it was. Unparalleled. Truly unsurpassed, until it was, and it was broken after that. The clown, of course. The boy. All very unfortunate, said some. Others stayed (truly stayed) quiet.

It was all turquoise then, the days and the nights. Light and stripes of dusk pressing down heavy on a sweating town just coming into its own skin, itching to burst but no one knowing it yet.

Explosive, maybe, to hear some. Peaceful, for others, a time of rest, a recuperation for the defeated watching the era forget them and succeed them. A status quo of newcomers interlocked in a buffer against the Bat. It overtook what came before, and Gotham was an island unto itself, cartoon death zooming around with cowlicks up, accustoming everyone to something no one else would ever feel.

Everyone was in on it, no one was on the same page, and everyone was jinxing their luck left and right.


End file.
